Really? You repeated the most frequently debunked and refuted out-of-context deliberately misleading piece of crap known to climate science, DELIBERATELY ELIDED THE MOST SIGNIFICANT PART OF THE ANSWER and actually acted like you were posting something worthwhile? You actually claimed that your link PROVES that climate science is a liberal plot, but somehow everybody but a select few brilliant conservatives have noticed this piece of evidence that the liberal conspirators have hidden in plain sight on one of the most-visited websites in the world?
Here's the actual answer, including the critical words that you DELIBERATELY OMITTED:
"Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods."
Hmmm, when you see it in full, it doesn't actually support your claim at all, does it? And the rest of the interview at that link also completely contradicts what you dishonestly claim it implies.
I can't decide from your one anonymous post whether you are willfully dishonest in your posting above, or merely so stupid that you failed to read or understand anything beyond the word "yes".
And then you have the effrontery to call other people "political hack" and "bigoted"?
I agree. I suspect that the next big breakthrough in foundational QM will come from experiments that probe what really happens during wavefunction collapse. And I also suspect that the reason most people find this so confusing is that they forget that the wavefunction evolves in configuration space, not physical spacetime. (Unfortunately, non-specialist presentations of QM often gloss over this distinction, and even compound the confusion by focusing on examples where the configuration space looks like a physical spacetime, e.g. the double slit experiment). As we understand decoherence better, I think it's going to turn out that wavefunction evolution (of which collapse is merely a special case) is in some sense "local" in configuration space. But understanding how this translates to the classical experience is going to require an understanding of how spacetime emerges from more fundamental concepts -- and that's way above my pay grade.
In my (decidely amateur) opinion, the Copenhagen Interpretation is a result of the fact that in the early days of quantum theory, physicists knew how to describe and calculate only with very simple systems. And they knew that by the time you got to very large systems, everything appeared to behave classically. They could say what happened either side of an "observation", but not in the middle. From there it is a huge and completely unjustified leap to the assertion that wave function collapse is "instantaneous". And unfortunately, the reputation and intellectual power of the Copenhagen school was such that any challenge to this assertion was effectively shouted down for many years -- look at the way De Broglie was treated.
These days experimentalists are working with increasingly large and increasingly widely separated entangled systems, and are able to ask what actually happens "during" wavefunction collapse (and I put that in quotes because the Copenhagen interpretation would deny that there is any such thing as "during"). I suspect what we're going to find is that there is no special, magical moment of observation associated with an instantaneous collapse, but rather a continuous process of decoherence whereby a system evolves from the spiky quantum state of superpositions into the muddy state we perceive as classical reality; and under all normal circumstances (i.e. anything other than carefully preserved laboratory experiments that isolate a system from environmental noise) this happens so quickly that we don't perceive it.
In other words: most interpretations of QM struggle with the question of "why doesn't quantum superposition propagate upwards into macro systems?"'; this is essentially what the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment is trying to highlight. And I suspect that the answer will be something along the lines of "quantum superposition is a very special circumstance, and in normal circumstances, classical noise propagates downwards into micro systems."
And yet, Many Worlds *does* require a special interaction that that distinguishes an observer who becomes entangled with a system in a special way as distinct from a superposition of states (e.g. two entangled photons) in a laboratory. The distinction is that with two entangled photons, an observer can observe the superposition; but as far as we know an observer cannot observe his own superposition: he always finds himself in one state (or one World, if you prefer) or another. Observers are special. So again, Many Worlds fails to explain what this observation is or when it takes place; nor what an observer's perception is; nor even what an observer is.
In fact, Many Worlds suffers from much the same Measurement Problem as the Copenhagen Interpretation: there is no rigorous definition of when an observation (or the perception of an observation, whatever that means -- I can't find "perception" in the wave equation anywhere?) takes place. And this is what has led some theorists to propose variations on Many Worlds that assign a special status to consciousness... which brings us full circle.
I also don't know what this "outside view" you refer to is. By definition, the Many Worlds are all that there is. So where would an outside viewer sit in order to get this outside view from which nothing special happened?
Incidentally, Everett's original thesis addresses none of this. Ever since it was published, in fact, other physicists have been trying to figure out what exactly he meant.
Damn, I wrote a long and careful reply to this and then hit the wrong button.
Brief recapitulation: No, physicists have largely (there's still a little wiggle room) ruled out local hidden variable theories. See Bell's Theorem. But if you give up locality you can keep "reality" which is what hidden variable theories give you. As Bell himself pointed out, DeBroglie-Bohm theory survives his test just fine, and he actually advocated that it deserved more attention.
And since QM increasingly seems to be non-local for other reasons anyway, hidden variable theories are still ruled in. Plus, they don't require the "and then some magic happens" invocation of mechanisms that have no basis in the physical theory of the two most popular interpretations that are required to explain what actually happens when a measurement is made. In the case of the Copenhagen interpretation, "And then the wave function instantaneously collapses everywhere"; in the case of Many Worlds, "And then the entire universe instantaneously splits into two and you find yourself in one of the copies", both of which sound pretty damn non-local to me.
Again: In higher mathematical usage, yes. In standard geometrical usage, no.
At the risk of repeating myself, in topics such as Euclidean solid geometry, "sphere" means the same thing it means in common usage, i.e. a solid. Thus we talk about the volume "of" a sphere, not the volume "inside" a sphere.
If you're going to use "sphere" in the higher mathematical sense as in topics that require you to distinguish carefully between the surface ("sphere") and the space bounded by the surface ("ball"), you are better off avoiding the term entirely and using something more specific such as 2-sphere.
If there's one thing worse in a Slashdot thread than people who don't know what they're talking about, it's people who think they know what they're talking about (or equally, people quoting Wikipedia out of context)
Since qualia are nonsensical inventions of the over-imaginative egos of philosophers whose feet are not planted on scientific ground, the relationship between normal humans and philosophical zombies is one of idempotency.
I don't pretend to understand the proof, but physicists are adamant that hidden variables have been ruled out.
That's a popular misconception, but almost completely untrue. J.S. Bell (of Bell's Theorem fame) himself was a proponent of DeBroglie-Bohm wave mechanics, a hidden variable theory, stating explicitly that it was consistent with his theorem and lamenting that it was given so little attention.
Bell's Theorem shows this: no local, hidden variable theory can reproduce the predictions of QM.
Now let's unpack this. First of all, it doesn't disprove local, hidden variable theories; it does provide a way to distinguish experimentally between those theories and standard QM, i.e. because they make different predictions in a specific experiment. So far, experiments (starting with Alain Aspect) are on the side of standard QM, BUT conscientious experimentalists point out that no experiment so far has precisely and pedantically fulfilled the requirements of Bell's Theorem, so there is still some wiggle room.
But let's grant for a moment that tests of Bell's Theorem are one day confirmed on the side of standard QM. All that rules out is local hidden variable theories. As Bell himself pointed out, non-local hidden variable theories, such as DeBroglie-Bohm, survive just fine (as do local, non-hidden variable theories). Basically, you have to give up either locality or "reality" [a term of art in QM]. And the more we understand about entanglement, quantum information, and related topics, the less tenable locality becomes anyway. So at this point, both flavors of non-local theory -- those with and those without hidden variables are equally supportable.
The big advantage of hidden variable theories is that they do away with the need for the "and then some magic happens" special pleading required in the other two main interpretations, where they introduce a mechanism to resolve the outcome of experiments that has no basis or description in the physical theory. (In the case of the Copenhagen interpretation, "and then the wave function instantaneously collapses everywhere at once"; in the case of Many Worlds, "and then the entire universe instantaneously splits, and you find yourself in one of the copies". And if both of those sound pretty damn non-local to you, well done.)
Well, kinda. In common geometrical usage, a sphere is a three dimensional SOLID whose surface is as you described. That's how Euclid used the term, and it's how anybody who studied math to less than college level would use the term.
In higher mathematical usage, an n-sphere is an n-dimensional object embedded in an (n+1) dimensional Euclidean space that satisfies the corresponding equation of constant distance from a point in that space. So a circle is a 1-sphere (a one dimensional line embedded in the two dimensional plane); the surface of a ball is a 2-sphere (a two dimensional surface embedded in three dimensional space); and 3-sphere is something you cannot picture because it's a three dimensional "surface" embedded in four dimensional space (and not, as some people mistakenly think, a ball).
So if we're going to be strictly pedantic, you could say that the solid body is a sphere [common geometrical usage] or the surface is a 2-sphere [strict mathematical usage], but it's nothing but confusing to define "sphere" the way you did.
Normally I'd just shrug and let this go, but since you used the phrase "rather than use math terms that you don't really understand"...
In other news, The Pedantic Spheres will be the name of my next band.
Information doesn't "want" anything. Information doesn't have needs, goals, purposes or desires. People do.
Using the expression "information wants to be free" merely clouds a complicated issue by loading one side of the argument with emotive, unarguable assertions. Who could possibly be against freedom? End slavery! Emancipate information! It's empty rhetoric of the worst kind.
If you mean something substantive about the nature of information, please state it in terms that are actually amenable to rational debate.
Unfortunately parents EGO gets in the way (of having a looser kid)
If I were funnier I would have some joke about the looseness of the kid. Instead I will just pause to wonder who is the greater loser, the one who complains about other people's academic achievements, or the one who can't manage the difference between "loser" and "looser"?
True enough about BASIC.
However one of the worst design flaws in C is the combination of using = as the assignment operator together with the liberal interpretation of what constitutes an expression. How many lifetimes have cumulatively been wasted because some tired programmer wrote "if (x = y)..." and the compiler raised no objection? Let's be honest, C is the king of side-effects.
In a sane language, = would not be used as an operator at all, neither for assignment nor equality test. Neither is what the symbol means in a mathematical equation, and allowing it for either is asking for trouble.
I see you didn't defend the Storm Trooper armor...
Oh, well, I'm not stupid. Tons of things in the SW universe make absolutely no sense.
Like, the whole plot, for instance? Instead of dragging two droids in and out of firefights, why don't they just email the Death Star plans to the rebel base? Or upload them to a bunch of torrent servers?
If you think that "The Kensington Runestone: Approaching A Research Question Holistically", with its chapters on geology, archaeology, linguistics, and biology is "an exciting book about an epic adventure"... either you've never read the book, or you've already decided what you want to be true. Apparently, you don't even know what conclusion Kehoe comes to. Either way, you've pretty clearly invalidated your qualifications to comment.
Look, the stone includes runes that appeared in no dictionary at the time, and this was taken as contemporary proof that it was a bad fake. Those runes were later found to be genuine by further research. How do you explain the presence of genuine runes unknown at the time if its a forgery? And why do you find the fabricated-after-the-fact, unsupported by any evidence fabulation that the stone was transported from Minnesota more plausible than the simplest explanation? Unless you can come up with a credible theory of who transported it, how, when, and for what gain, and how it came to be buried and then found... you've got nothing other than, to borrow a phrase, an epic adventure that you desperately want to be true.
For the record, I have no desire, desperate or otherwise, for this to be true or false. I have no historical, ethnic or other attachment to the story. I simply looked at the evidence, and it's obvious which side of the argument is ignoring the evidence it doesn't like...
The Kensington Runestone is almost certainly authentic, for one simple reason. It includes runes that at the time of its discovery were not in any known runic dictionary, which is one major reason it was considered a fake at the time of its discovery by linguistic experts, but decades later were found to be authentic runes. A pretty neat trick for a purported 19th century hoaxer, no?
Whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry should probably have a chat with Alice Beck Kehoe of the Univesity of Wisconsin, as she thoroughly deals with all the arguments raised there while providing substantial unanswered evidence for authenticity. I note that her key text on the topic "The Kensington Runestone: Approaching a Research Question Holistically" is not cited in the Wiki entry.
Unfortunately, this is what you get when you rely on Wikipedia as a sole source.
"visited", almost certainly; "colonized", more dubiously. It's still up in the air whether the Greenlanders or other Norse actually settled Vinland to the extent of overwintering there, let alone attempting to colonize, or whether they simply established summer camps to hunt and cut timber, which was much needed back in Greenland.
Back on topic: what about the anachronistic textual references on the map? Later additions?
Erich Beta was functionally complete, but bugged the hell out of everybody. As of this week, he also shuts down every two hours, which is pretty annoying.
You don't need to use the whole set of tools. If you're working in a small team and an Agile process, Rational Team Concert may be the only tool you want. If you're working in a more ceremonial organization you might benefit from other tools in the Rational portfolio, or from integrating whatever external tools you might want. The original internal users of Rational Team Concert were/are themselves small, Agile teams.
I know it goes against a lot of people here's expectations of IBM but really, Jazz is an attempt to do something different and better by a bunch of people with a pretty good track record who were given free rein to build the tools that they themselves would choose to use. If you try out the free edition that runs on Derby and Apache and you still hate it/think its too heavyweight after that, then fine, that's an informed opinion. But I really can't say this strong enough: don't prejudge Jazz by your preconceptions or previous experiences. Fair enough?
Disclaimer: I also work for IBM Rational. I've worked in a lot of other places too and I've been around the block a couple of times.
Maybe it's hard to summarize in a couple of sentences because Jazz really is a number of things. I'll try to describe each of them in one to three sentences. And I'll try not to use marketing buzzwords, although I can't promise not to use URLs.
1. Jazz is the belief that professional software development is a team effort, and the part of that effort that tools in the past have supported least well is communication and collaboration between team members. Tools in the past treated communication more like a ceremony than a conversation. That's just wrong.
The question that Erich and his colleagues set themselves was: what can we do to make it easier to work as a team? So the features that you find across Jazz tools include things like team awareness, status tracking, newsfeeds for things like build completion or test pass/fail, and so on.
2. Jazz is also platform or technology stack that provides common services like storage, query, events, process, collaboration, etc. to tools built on top of it. Middleware for tools, if you like. It relies heavily on Eclipse technologies including OSGi. Rational Team Concert is one example of a tool built on the Jazz platform, there are many more.
3. Jazz also is an integration technical architecture that uses RESTful interfaces between tools, whether those tools are on the Jazz platform or standalone. Links between artifacts are simply URIs. It's designed to be, yes, loosely coupled and web-style. What that means in practice is that you don't have brittle connections where upgrading one tool breaks the integration with another. It also means you don't have to consolidate everything into one repository. The open part of that integration is OSLC, which is where we are developing specs for integration, i.e. metadata definitions in XML and JSON plus service interfaces, in plain sight and publishing them under Creative Commons so that anybody can consume them to integrate with our tools -- or, heck, without our tools if they want to. Anybody can also participate in the spec process -- there's no membership fees or purity test, and the only requirement is a willingness to disclaim patent enforcement against anybody who implements a spec.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless it's built by Dyson.
Really? You repeated the most frequently debunked and refuted out-of-context deliberately misleading piece of crap known to climate science, DELIBERATELY ELIDED THE MOST SIGNIFICANT PART OF THE ANSWER and actually acted like you were posting something worthwhile? You actually claimed that your link PROVES that climate science is a liberal plot, but somehow everybody but a select few brilliant conservatives have noticed this piece of evidence that the liberal conspirators have hidden in plain sight on one of the most-visited websites in the world?
Here's the actual answer, including the critical words that you DELIBERATELY OMITTED:
"Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods."
Hmmm, when you see it in full, it doesn't actually support your claim at all, does it? And the rest of the interview at that link also completely contradicts what you dishonestly claim it implies.
I can't decide from your one anonymous post whether you are willfully dishonest in your posting above, or merely so stupid that you failed to read or understand anything beyond the word "yes".
And then you have the effrontery to call other people "political hack" and "bigoted"?
I agree. I suspect that the next big breakthrough in foundational QM will come from experiments that probe what really happens during wavefunction collapse. And I also suspect that the reason most people find this so confusing is that they forget that the wavefunction evolves in configuration space, not physical spacetime. (Unfortunately, non-specialist presentations of QM often gloss over this distinction, and even compound the confusion by focusing on examples where the configuration space looks like a physical spacetime, e.g. the double slit experiment). As we understand decoherence better, I think it's going to turn out that wavefunction evolution (of which collapse is merely a special case) is in some sense "local" in configuration space. But understanding how this translates to the classical experience is going to require an understanding of how spacetime emerges from more fundamental concepts -- and that's way above my pay grade.
In my (decidely amateur) opinion, the Copenhagen Interpretation is a result of the fact that in the early days of quantum theory, physicists knew how to describe and calculate only with very simple systems. And they knew that by the time you got to very large systems, everything appeared to behave classically. They could say what happened either side of an "observation", but not in the middle. From there it is a huge and completely unjustified leap to the assertion that wave function collapse is "instantaneous". And unfortunately, the reputation and intellectual power of the Copenhagen school was such that any challenge to this assertion was effectively shouted down for many years -- look at the way De Broglie was treated.
These days experimentalists are working with increasingly large and increasingly widely separated entangled systems, and are able to ask what actually happens "during" wavefunction collapse (and I put that in quotes because the Copenhagen interpretation would deny that there is any such thing as "during"). I suspect what we're going to find is that there is no special, magical moment of observation associated with an instantaneous collapse, but rather a continuous process of decoherence whereby a system evolves from the spiky quantum state of superpositions into the muddy state we perceive as classical reality; and under all normal circumstances (i.e. anything other than carefully preserved laboratory experiments that isolate a system from environmental noise) this happens so quickly that we don't perceive it.
In other words: most interpretations of QM struggle with the question of "why doesn't quantum superposition propagate upwards into macro systems?"'; this is essentially what the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment is trying to highlight. And I suspect that the answer will be something along the lines of "quantum superposition is a very special circumstance, and in normal circumstances, classical noise propagates downwards into micro systems."
And yet, Many Worlds *does* require a special interaction that that distinguishes an observer who becomes entangled with a system in a special way as distinct from a superposition of states (e.g. two entangled photons) in a laboratory. The distinction is that with two entangled photons, an observer can observe the superposition; but as far as we know an observer cannot observe his own superposition: he always finds himself in one state (or one World, if you prefer) or another. Observers are special. So again, Many Worlds fails to explain what this observation is or when it takes place; nor what an observer's perception is; nor even what an observer is.
In fact, Many Worlds suffers from much the same Measurement Problem as the Copenhagen Interpretation: there is no rigorous definition of when an observation (or the perception of an observation, whatever that means -- I can't find "perception" in the wave equation anywhere?) takes place. And this is what has led some theorists to propose variations on Many Worlds that assign a special status to consciousness... which brings us full circle.
I also don't know what this "outside view" you refer to is. By definition, the Many Worlds are all that there is. So where would an outside viewer sit in order to get this outside view from which nothing special happened?
Incidentally, Everett's original thesis addresses none of this. Ever since it was published, in fact, other physicists have been trying to figure out what exactly he meant.
Damn, I wrote a long and careful reply to this and then hit the wrong button.
Brief recapitulation: No, physicists have largely (there's still a little wiggle room) ruled out local hidden variable theories. See Bell's Theorem. But if you give up locality you can keep "reality" which is what hidden variable theories give you. As Bell himself pointed out, DeBroglie-Bohm theory survives his test just fine, and he actually advocated that it deserved more attention.
And since QM increasingly seems to be non-local for other reasons anyway, hidden variable theories are still ruled in. Plus, they don't require the "and then some magic happens" invocation of mechanisms that have no basis in the physical theory of the two most popular interpretations that are required to explain what actually happens when a measurement is made. In the case of the Copenhagen interpretation, "And then the wave function instantaneously collapses everywhere"; in the case of Many Worlds, "And then the entire universe instantaneously splits into two and you find yourself in one of the copies", both of which sound pretty damn non-local to me.
Def. 14 precisely defines a solid body as the volume swept out by the area of the semicircle.
Again: In higher mathematical usage, yes. In standard geometrical usage, no. At the risk of repeating myself, in topics such as Euclidean solid geometry, "sphere" means the same thing it means in common usage, i.e. a solid. Thus we talk about the volume "of" a sphere, not the volume "inside" a sphere. If you're going to use "sphere" in the higher mathematical sense as in topics that require you to distinguish carefully between the surface ("sphere") and the space bounded by the surface ("ball"), you are better off avoiding the term entirely and using something more specific such as 2-sphere. If there's one thing worse in a Slashdot thread than people who don't know what they're talking about, it's people who think they know what they're talking about (or equally, people quoting Wikipedia out of context)
Since qualia are nonsensical inventions of the over-imaginative egos of philosophers whose feet are not planted on scientific ground, the relationship between normal humans and philosophical zombies is one of idempotency.
And yet, it still moves me.
I don't pretend to understand the proof, but physicists are adamant that hidden variables have been ruled out.
That's a popular misconception, but almost completely untrue. J.S. Bell (of Bell's Theorem fame) himself was a proponent of DeBroglie-Bohm wave mechanics, a hidden variable theory, stating explicitly that it was consistent with his theorem and lamenting that it was given so little attention.
Bell's Theorem shows this: no local, hidden variable theory can reproduce the predictions of QM.
Now let's unpack this. First of all, it doesn't disprove local, hidden variable theories; it does provide a way to distinguish experimentally between those theories and standard QM, i.e. because they make different predictions in a specific experiment. So far, experiments (starting with Alain Aspect) are on the side of standard QM, BUT conscientious experimentalists point out that no experiment so far has precisely and pedantically fulfilled the requirements of Bell's Theorem, so there is still some wiggle room.
But let's grant for a moment that tests of Bell's Theorem are one day confirmed on the side of standard QM. All that rules out is local hidden variable theories. As Bell himself pointed out, non-local hidden variable theories, such as DeBroglie-Bohm, survive just fine (as do local, non-hidden variable theories). Basically, you have to give up either locality or "reality" [a term of art in QM]. And the more we understand about entanglement, quantum information, and related topics, the less tenable locality becomes anyway. So at this point, both flavors of non-local theory -- those with and those without hidden variables are equally supportable.
The big advantage of hidden variable theories is that they do away with the need for the "and then some magic happens" special pleading required in the other two main interpretations, where they introduce a mechanism to resolve the outcome of experiments that has no basis or description in the physical theory. (In the case of the Copenhagen interpretation, "and then the wave function instantaneously collapses everywhere at once"; in the case of Many Worlds, "and then the entire universe instantaneously splits, and you find yourself in one of the copies". And if both of those sound pretty damn non-local to you, well done.)
Well, kinda. In common geometrical usage, a sphere is a three dimensional SOLID whose surface is as you described. That's how Euclid used the term, and it's how anybody who studied math to less than college level would use the term. In higher mathematical usage, an n-sphere is an n-dimensional object embedded in an (n+1) dimensional Euclidean space that satisfies the corresponding equation of constant distance from a point in that space. So a circle is a 1-sphere (a one dimensional line embedded in the two dimensional plane); the surface of a ball is a 2-sphere (a two dimensional surface embedded in three dimensional space); and 3-sphere is something you cannot picture because it's a three dimensional "surface" embedded in four dimensional space (and not, as some people mistakenly think, a ball). So if we're going to be strictly pedantic, you could say that the solid body is a sphere [common geometrical usage] or the surface is a 2-sphere [strict mathematical usage], but it's nothing but confusing to define "sphere" the way you did. Normally I'd just shrug and let this go, but since you used the phrase "rather than use math terms that you don't really understand"... In other news, The Pedantic Spheres will be the name of my next band.
You forgot to say: The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part.
Information doesn't "want" anything. Information doesn't have needs, goals, purposes or desires. People do. Using the expression "information wants to be free" merely clouds a complicated issue by loading one side of the argument with emotive, unarguable assertions. Who could possibly be against freedom? End slavery! Emancipate information! It's empty rhetoric of the worst kind. If you mean something substantive about the nature of information, please state it in terms that are actually amenable to rational debate.
...seem to involve somebody else with valuable skills working for free?
Unfortunately parents EGO gets in the way (of having a looser kid)
If I were funnier I would have some joke about the looseness of the kid. Instead I will just pause to wonder who is the greater loser, the one who complains about other people's academic achievements, or the one who can't manage the difference between "loser" and "looser"?
That should read
5. Divide by zero
6. Profit!
True enough about BASIC. However one of the worst design flaws in C is the combination of using = as the assignment operator together with the liberal interpretation of what constitutes an expression. How many lifetimes have cumulatively been wasted because some tired programmer wrote "if (x = y) ..." and the compiler raised no objection? Let's be honest, C is the king of side-effects.
In a sane language, = would not be used as an operator at all, neither for assignment nor equality test. Neither is what the symbol means in a mathematical equation, and allowing it for either is asking for trouble.
I see you didn't defend the Storm Trooper armor...
Oh, well, I'm not stupid. Tons of things in the SW universe make absolutely no sense.
Like, the whole plot, for instance? Instead of dragging two droids in and out of firefights, why don't they just email the Death Star plans to the rebel base? Or upload them to a bunch of torrent servers?
If you think that "The Kensington Runestone: Approaching A Research Question Holistically", with its chapters on geology, archaeology, linguistics, and biology is "an exciting book about an epic adventure"... either you've never read the book, or you've already decided what you want to be true. Apparently, you don't even know what conclusion Kehoe comes to. Either way, you've pretty clearly invalidated your qualifications to comment. Look, the stone includes runes that appeared in no dictionary at the time, and this was taken as contemporary proof that it was a bad fake. Those runes were later found to be genuine by further research. How do you explain the presence of genuine runes unknown at the time if its a forgery? And why do you find the fabricated-after-the-fact, unsupported by any evidence fabulation that the stone was transported from Minnesota more plausible than the simplest explanation? Unless you can come up with a credible theory of who transported it, how, when, and for what gain, and how it came to be buried and then found... you've got nothing other than, to borrow a phrase, an epic adventure that you desperately want to be true. For the record, I have no desire, desperate or otherwise, for this to be true or false. I have no historical, ethnic or other attachment to the story. I simply looked at the evidence, and it's obvious which side of the argument is ignoring the evidence it doesn't like...
The Kensington Runestone is almost certainly authentic, for one simple reason. It includes runes that at the time of its discovery were not in any known runic dictionary, which is one major reason it was considered a fake at the time of its discovery by linguistic experts, but decades later were found to be authentic runes. A pretty neat trick for a purported 19th century hoaxer, no? Whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry should probably have a chat with Alice Beck Kehoe of the Univesity of Wisconsin, as she thoroughly deals with all the arguments raised there while providing substantial unanswered evidence for authenticity. I note that her key text on the topic "The Kensington Runestone: Approaching a Research Question Holistically" is not cited in the Wiki entry. Unfortunately, this is what you get when you rely on Wikipedia as a sole source.
"visited", almost certainly; "colonized", more dubiously. It's still up in the air whether the Greenlanders or other Norse actually settled Vinland to the extent of overwintering there, let alone attempting to colonize, or whether they simply established summer camps to hunt and cut timber, which was much needed back in Greenland. Back on topic: what about the anachronistic textual references on the map? Later additions?
Erich Alpha was completely unstable.
Erich Beta was functionally complete, but bugged the hell out of everybody. As of this week, he also shuts down every two hours, which is pretty annoying.
Disclaimer: IBMer here.
You don't need to use the whole set of tools. If you're working in a small team and an Agile process, Rational Team Concert may be the only tool you want. If you're working in a more ceremonial organization you might benefit from other tools in the Rational portfolio, or from integrating whatever external tools you might want. The original internal users of Rational Team Concert were/are themselves small, Agile teams.
I know it goes against a lot of people here's expectations of IBM but really, Jazz is an attempt to do something different and better by a bunch of people with a pretty good track record who were given free rein to build the tools that they themselves would choose to use. If you try out the free edition that runs on Derby and Apache and you still hate it/think its too heavyweight after that, then fine, that's an informed opinion. But I really can't say this strong enough: don't prejudge Jazz by your preconceptions or previous experiences. Fair enough?
Disclaimer: I also work for IBM Rational. I've worked in a lot of other places too and I've been around the block a couple of times.
Maybe it's hard to summarize in a couple of sentences because Jazz really is a number of things. I'll try to describe each of them in one to three sentences. And I'll try not to use marketing buzzwords, although I can't promise not to use URLs.
1. Jazz is the belief that professional software development is a team effort, and the part of that effort that tools in the past have supported least well is communication and collaboration between team members. Tools in the past treated communication more like a ceremony than a conversation. That's just wrong.
The question that Erich and his colleagues set themselves was: what can we do to make it easier to work as a team? So the features that you find across Jazz tools include things like team awareness, status tracking, newsfeeds for things like build completion or test pass/fail, and so on.
2. Jazz is also platform or technology stack that provides common services like storage, query, events, process, collaboration, etc. to tools built on top of it. Middleware for tools, if you like. It relies heavily on Eclipse technologies including OSGi. Rational Team Concert is one example of a tool built on the Jazz platform, there are many more.
3. Jazz also is an integration technical architecture that uses RESTful interfaces between tools, whether those tools are on the Jazz platform or standalone. Links between artifacts are simply URIs. It's designed to be, yes, loosely coupled and web-style. What that means in practice is that you don't have brittle connections where upgrading one tool breaks the integration with another. It also means you don't have to consolidate everything into one repository. The open part of that integration is OSLC, which is where we are developing specs for integration, i.e. metadata definitions in XML and JSON plus service interfaces, in plain sight and publishing them under Creative Commons so that anybody can consume them to integrate with our tools -- or, heck, without our tools if they want to. Anybody can also participate in the spec process -- there's no membership fees or purity test, and the only requirement is a willingness to disclaim patent enforcement against anybody who implements a spec.
Does that help?